Kasetsart University
Thailand
A fire escape project with virtual reality (VR) or Fire Escape VR (FEVR) is a virtual system that is used in reviewing exercises in a fire situation. Training for fire situations can cause damage to people’s lives and property. Generally, this training requires considerable finance and is dangerous for the trainees, so it is not organized often. These concerns motivated us to implement a simulation to reduce the risk to trainees.
Researchers choose VR technology to gain the most realistic experience for the participants. In the development phase, we used blender software to create models, such as fire equipment, tables, and chairs. Next, we extended the MS Windows Mixed Reality Toolkit library as the main script. Lastly, we used the Unity programme to integrate the blender model and the main script to build game scenes, such as buildings, pieces of furniture and fire extinguishers. When trainees launch the FEVR application, they have to set up their own avatar by inserting their height and weight, which can affect movement. The FEVR trainees faced different situations in the building, e.g. random fires at the risk points of rooms; fire damaging the hallway of the building; and dark smoke flowing through the building which disturbed people’s vision. The FEVR was designed to be similar to a real fire for the trainees to gain experience on how to use a fire extinguisher correctly to clear the fire and practise a survival experience.
The experiment was conducted with a group of 30 volunteers to test the usefulness of our simulation. The experimental group was separated into two groups, with the first group being trained with FEVR and the second with VDO. All the participants were tested with the fire escape evaluation process in fire situations.
Our results demonstrated that the participants who trained with FEVR had higher scores than those who trained with VDO.
This training simulation can improve the critical thinking and decision-making of a trainee in a real situation.